Recently I passed through El Paso, Texas on my way to visit my parents in Arizona.
El Paso is a U.S. city that is separated from Mexico by the Rio Grande.
On one side of the river, the city is El Paso and on the other side it is Cuidad Juárez.
You can feel the sense that these are two countries, separated by so little.
Juarez and El Paso could be called one city, but when you look from El Paso into Juarez, you know that you are no longer looking at the United States.

Photographer Scott Dalton is an American who lived in Colombia for several years as a photojournalist. There he worked on a series called Macondo: Journeys in García Márquez's Colombia I love the idea of magical realism in reality- parrots in trees and vividly dressed beauty queens. His most recent work So Close, So Far: Daily Life and Cartel Violence in Ciudad Juárez has a more grounded sense than the Colombia work, less magical and more realism.

Since he has moved back to the United States he has been photographing in Cuidad Juárez, this place of the strange divide by the Rio Grande of the US and Mexico
He starts his statement about the work by quoting the former president of Mexico Porfirio Díaz who said “Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States.” To me this embodies this sad separation perfectly.

When writing about the violence in Mexico Dalton says, “… daily life in Juárez maintains a paradoxical serenity, at once contradictory to and somehow acquiescent in the crisis that is overwhelming the city. With no end in sight to the violence, the city and its people live in limbo, able only to see what each new day may bring. “

Dalton has crossed the gap with these images, which are so beautiful it is hard not to be entranced and seduced by the colors and at the same time saddened by this reality.

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